Fudo is Fox News, Theo is Democracy Now

Red Tops
Well, your stock in trade is not impersonal, even-handed journalism (though that does come much more easily to you and many of your other writers) so much as early dirt and [humorous] editorialization -- very much in the spirit of British papers. And this is generally what your audience is looking for. In the GPU arena, you often have information much earlier and in more detail than any other mainstream source.

But Mr. Abazovic is probably your most extreme "news" writer in the degree to which he spins everything in favor of one camp (ATI) -- a reality for which I've bitched him out a few times, perhaps more harshly than I should have (not without love! ;) It's kind of like watching Fox News, only if you *had* to because you knew they were the only ones who would break all the interesting stories.

And the introduction of Theo seems to be the Democracy Now to Fudo's Fox (or more likely another, slightly more tame Fox, on the other side of the fence): not the same as having real even-handed and withdrawn story writing on GPUs, but at least it balances out the mean coverage. Just looking at two back-to-back stories of the 6800GS AGP vs. X1600 launches bears this out with amazing clarity -- on the one side trusting the X1600 really will come 'real soon now, just like they promised,' and be everything to everyone while accusing the slow release of the 6800GS AGP before Christmas as being the stupidest thing humanly possible, and on the other side raving about the 'really soon to be released -- I trust them' 6800 vs. the deceptively nonexistent X1600 on any bus.

When Nvidia was having their asses handed to them in late 2002 and 2003, with only their marketing department saying otherwise, Fuad's effort to tear through their FUD over how "OMG FAST!!" NV30 would be, how significant 1k instruction fragment programs were on slow-as-balls GPUs, etc. seemed reasonable, but with the situation was so totally reversed in Nvidia's favor over the last 9 months, hearing him promise "OGM FAST" when even ATI wasn't making grand claims for R520 was a little ridiculous. When 520 "shipped" and the reviews unanimously concluded that it was unreasonably expensive ($150 more than the GTX on the street), unavailable (still not shipping, vs. the GTX which has been in stores since launch day in June), and noncompetitive (loosing most game benchmarks by a reasonable margin) all he could talk about was how Nvidia was being scared by competition from ATI and needed to do more to "recapture" the lead they never, in anyone's estimation but his, lost.

The problem isn't that this isn't the sort of writing we now expect from him, or exactly what he is meant to write, but that it can be frustrating when discovering all the useful, first-broken dirt requires sifting it out of so much fanboi-editorialization- masquerading-as-expert-commentary-and-news. Basically, good "news" is traditionally modestly juicy facts interwoven with reasonable analysis, and much of The Inq's GPU coverage consists of impressively juicy facts interwoven with half-english, spin-heavy ravings.

I read your site religiously, though, and not in a masochistic "I hate this so much -- I must keep coming back so I can get more mad about how bad it is" kind of way, so backhanded complements to Fudo aside, I really do value and appreciate your creation, not to mention his dirt-digging skills. Seriously ;)

jrk

Intel vs AMD, ATI vs Nvidia

While it's an intewresting comparison: Intel vs AMD, and ATI vs Nvidia, they aren't quite apt.

Intel had to abandon all of its design, theory, and roadmap when hitting the 90nm barrier in order to compete.

ATI is not in a pickle. I don't agree that Nvidia gets more out of a MHz than ATI. You yourself mentioned the number of pipes. 50% more in the case of Nvidia.

ATI chose to use fewer because it could do more with 16 vs Nvidia with 24. And with improved drivers they have shown that they can. drivers that haven't been completed as yet.

If ATI were to look at the 7800 512MB board and decide that they should add more pipes to the design, they could do that with some, but not a vast amount of effort. All Nvidia could do in response would be to raise the speeds. But, as you mentioned, ATI could again do the same.

I'm not saying that they will, but they could.

Where would Nvidia be if ATI did do that?

I wonder if the R580 uses 24 pipes? If it does, then Nvidia is in trouble.

Name supplied

RIM, Blackberry and patents

I have studied Research in Motion (RIM) and believe that they are astute business people based on the sophistication of both their legal and PR efforts. Both leave no stone unturned.

So they claim to have developed NPT's patented technology independently. Are we to believe that they never did a prior art search as part of their business plan? Or did they do a thorough search, and then did a thorough background check on the people in NPT? Did they perhaps decide that NPT would not notice the use of their invention? Perhaps if RIM knew of the technology they hoped that NPT would not have the resources to challenge the appropriation of their patents?

So what is it, was RIM careless and didn't check or were they arrogant and thought they could get away with taking NPT's property? If they were stupid the failure to check was their and only their fault. If they decided to be a big bully, and the litigation history leaves no doubt they are a bully, well then RIM's situation is their own fault.

Let's say that RIM was stupid and failed to check. They squatted on another's property and when they were caught they could have left or they could have negotiated reasonable compensation to lease the use of the property. But instead they took a scorched earth approach....and they lost. At that time they could have negotiated compensation, granted it would have cost them more for all the trouble they had caused the real property owner. But once again RIM took the low road. RIM mobilized a massive legal, PR and lobbying effort to paint the victims as abusers. RIM raped, and continued to rape NPT while telling all that NPT really asked for it. After all, NPT's technology was provocative and desirable.

PIAUSA members had opposed the patent reexamination procedure because we felt that expanding reexamination of patents to include adversaries of inventors would increase the time such procedures would take and more importantly increase the costs by an order of magnitude. We felt that such procedures would be abused with the intent of driving inventors bankrupt. And just as PIAUSA members had predicted, RIM has abused reexamination to try and break NPT. Not on the merits, but break them with punitive costs associated with the new adversarial reexamination procedures. Something on the order of THIRTY reexaminations!

RIM is a foreign multination corporation who has been found by the courts to have stolen an American's property. Much of the media coverage glosses over the facts and paints the victims as the guilty party. Who is pushing these misleading stories? Who gains from the media campaign?

It is long past time that the American people, and especially our government back and protect the victims from being further victimized. What has gone on in this case is an outrage. Foreign company theft of American innovation is widespread. It is a serious threat to America's economic and national security. Stories like this one are far too common. The majority of inventors who produce viable inventions face a bully like RIM.

When innovative companies like NPT have their property taken we all suffer. The American public has been victimized, for jobs and tax base which should have been created in America were stolen.

As a matter of good public policy it is time for all branches of American government and law enforcement to get rid of their Blackberries and replace them with an American product and service such as the Palm and the NPT licensed "Good" service which does the same tasks as the Blackberry. Companies who play by the rules should be rewarded, and those who do not should be shunned.

The Professional Inventors Alliance is calling for justice, and such justice should start with an injunction against RIM and a phased replacement of Blackberry with Palm devices. RIM should be required to issue full refunds to all who have purchased Blackberry's in America.

http://www.piausa.org/general_info/about_us/

Ronald J Riley, President
Professional Inventors Alliance
www.PIAUSA.org

Air Force gets phasers set to stun

Hello

I guess temporarily blinding someone is non-lethal, so long as the blindee doesn't walk in front of a tank or fall down some stairs? Perhaps the army can train a load of labradors to go off and guide people that have been lasered?

A bit like the Russkies using nerve gas in the theatre hostage seige where loads of people suffocated after being knocked out unconscious - I suppose the nerve gas was non-lethal up to the point where people stopped being able to breathe.

Cheers
snedger

Gartner mystic predicts IT future

Regarding some random Gartner prognosticator's predictions...

> By 2008, 10 per cent of companies will require > their employees to buy their own notebooks > with allowances, freeing up IT to focus on > business initiatives rather than supporting > the PC assets.

I've worked IT and support. The above would be a nightmare; IT would still be expected to support employees' machines, but now they'd have to worry about a thousand hardware and software configurations instead of the two or three they have when they pick standardized models and do bulk purchases.

This guy can't have his head screwed on straight.

Charles

Symantec kills free Sygate firewall

More importantly, they "underlapped" in Symantec's ever-hungry bottom line - which is undoubtedly what matters the most.

There is something wrong with the morals of the world when a company can buy another company's assets without buying the obligations that go with it. Sygate had a free version that Symantec has no right to discontinue. It is wrong, period.

I am highly disappointed by Symantec, which is starting to build a history of buying out good products only to bury them in the ensuing chaos. Could it be that the CEO worked with Microsoft before ? At the very least, Symantec is taking one heck of a leaf from Bill's success book.

However, whereas making a new OS is quite an endeavour, creating a free firewall is hardly that difficult - the number of those available that are free for personal use attests to that fact.

So, basically, Symantec is just widening the market for the others, and simultaneously shutting itself out. Not to worry though, I'm sure Mr. Thomson has a wonderful golden parachute all ready to deploy.

Pascal

World of Warcraft

Hello all

I am writing you this as an avid WoW (World of Warcraft) player.

The game is the best selling today in North America, and has the highest Player Base ever with over 1'000'000 Subscribers world wide.

Blizzard supports the game with updates at a monthly rate (~). In early summer they introduced a system called "honor system". It promotes PvP combat between players which results into points you can get. The more points you get the higher your rank in the pvp system is. The higher it is you get rewards. The system is a ladder system. It compares your advancement with all other players on your server. It has 14 Ranks. Up to rank 8-9 it is no problem. But only Rank 12+ rewards you with really good rewards. Everyone would like to be able to get them.

But it is impossible IF you do not play 20 hours a day. Yes, you heared me right, 20 hours a day. OR you have friends that take shifts.

Since weeks people are telling this injustice to the Development without success.

Just in the last week we have a Post on the official board of WoW of a player who shows how borken the sytem is. His post has a record of over 1000 replay (most replays a post ever had up to date).

Please read it up and make up your mind.

I am writing you this in the hope you might make a story on your page about it. After all it is THE MMORPG at the current time. And the whole player base gets totaly negelcted. Instead Blizzard is investing into an expansion, not fixing what is broken. They take the rout every other dev team took.

Thanks a lot for your help

A reader

AV, Switzerland

Intel, AMD, Nvidia, ATI, Sony, Dell, &c all get sued

Greetings.

Something that comes to mind is SGI's Octane UNIX workstation.

This sytem has four XIO slots (packet-based high-bandwidth bus, somewhat similar to HyperTransport). [1]

The Octane was introduced in January 1997 [2] while the Microlinc-related patent was filed November 1997 [3].

I am presuming that the SGI tech can be used as a "prior art" defense against this patent claim.

References
[1] See "System architecture overview" in here
[2] Here
[3] Here

Cheers
Andros

Consoles

Years ago the game console industry came up with the concept of selling the console at a loss to under cut competition, while making back the money via cartridge/CD/DVD, etc sales. For each individual Xbox game sold, Microsoft gets a percentage of the sale price. What that percentage is, I don't know.

Nintendo has being doing this for almost two decades. Keep in mind a consoles life time before it becomes obsolete is at least two years. Computer hardware becomes far cheaper as newer, faster hardware is released.

In time, Microsoft's hardware costs should then fall at least some where close to it's wholesale sales price. If they were to price the unit above cost, demand would be lower and thus not generate the game sales.

Both games and the console itself are expensive to develop, however, once developed, games have an incremental cost related to a blank DVD, jewel case (sometimes) or envelope and box. If a game sells for $50, and has an incremental cost of $5 then there is plenty of room for profit for the game company and Microsoft.

Since the fee per unit is the same for each game, development cost is a concern only for the developer, not Microsoft.

At least on the game side, it's a no lose situation for Microsoft, while they are in control of how many game consoles they produce and will try to keep manufacturing limited to aviod runaway costs and discounting. It's obvious that unit numbers were kept low, stores seemed to have only 8 to a dozen units in each location for the launch. Earlier this year Sony launched their PSP to equal fanfare, but had sufficient inventories, actually too sufficient. Sales did not meet Sony's expectations.

Jeff Dranetz

Bums on photocopiers

No surprise there - I once had to extract my ball python from the HP OfficeJet G85.

That is, after it took me a week to figure out where the snake was hiding.

Ball Python

Nick

Irish crying out for broadband

Thanks for publishing that, the more people realise how bad it is the better.

At the moment eircom are charging 4.93c(€2.96 hour)/min peak, for dial up Internet access. On top of that monthly rental of €24.18 just to have a phone line.

A standard 1MB/128k Dsl is approx €35 per month, with a 2GB week allowance. upgrade to 2MB/128(4GBp/w!!!) for €10 extra

All bill enquiries are handled by a frickin robotic answering machine who continuously tells you "I'm sorry, could you repeat your last sentence"

Eircom support don't know what naked DSL is, so you have no chance of getting anything on the cheap.

Cable broadband(ntl/chorus) is much better but not as available, 3MB/512 is €45(60GB cap) Thank god I have cable, I'm about €80 per month richer that the poor eircom customers

Rip off Ireland

Steve, in the middle of it all

Intel sues Intell over Intel

And lost ?

If I remember correctly, the last time was a spat about a company dealing in actual intelligence, the politically-correct word for spying.

And Intel lost on the grounds that spy info has always been Intelligence, and abbreviated as Intel (like any political novelist - i.e. Tom Clancy - has known for ages).

So one defeat hasn't been enough ? Is Intel not content with getting regularly humiliated on its very own home turf - PC processors ? Do they really have to go out of their way like that to accumulate additional ridicule ?

I think we should be told.

Name supplied

Xbox 360 bill of materials

Article recap: The Xbox 360 sells for $399, but it costs $525 to make.

This is inaccurate.

The Bill Of Materials is $525. They still need to manufacture them (OK, it's in China), ship them out to the USA and no shop is going to sell them at cost. They also need to pay for shipping the parts to the factory (even though most parts are produced locally). So: Retailer revenue: ~$25 Shipping & manufacturing: ~$10

They don't lose $126 per console, but more like $160 (28% more)... It may not seem like a big difference, but they plan on selling more than 5 million units before the end of 1H06... That's almost $200 million. Or, in total, not far off from $1 billion lost in the first 8 months if the production prices stay the same.

Can you say "buying marketshare"? The BOM for the original Xbox was only $323 and it sold for $299...

Name supplied